When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It's just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.